Making VLEs more interesting

In his session at the UKCLE event on creativity and the law curriculum in 2008 Michael Bromby (Glasgow Caledonian University) provided a taster of discussion boards and RSS feeds, bolt-ons to the ‘traditional’ VLE he uses with the aim of making learning more interesting as well as saving staff time.

To find out more contact Michael on: M.Bromby@gcal.ac.uk or see his paper Virtual seminars: problem-based learning in healthcare law and ethics, published in JILT 2009 (3).

Discussion boards

Discussion boards can be used as an alternative to (as well as replicating) face to face seminars. Successful discussion boards can both improve student performance and benefit the learning experience, but you do need to give clear expectations – and write the rules in advance!

Discussion board rule book

1. Take care in formulating your post to consider how your sentences are phrased and that the meaning is clear.
2. If need be, start a new discussion thread so that the board is reasonably organised and the group knows where the action is happening.
3. Be respectful of everyone’s opinion.
4. Encourage positive comments. A good general rule: criticise ideas, not people.
5. Don’t argue – if someone disagrees, try the following: A comments, B disagrees, A gives response, B then replies.
6. Don’t post anything you would not want made public or that you would not want anyone to know came from you – remember this is a seminar class!
7. When posting, keep your comments consistent with the subject and purpose of the thread of discussion.
8. State concisely and clearly the specific topic of the comments in the subject line of the posting. This allows members to respond more appropriately to your posting and makes it easier for members to search the archives by subject.
9. Send messages such as “I agree” or “me, too” to individuals, not to the entire group.
10. Don’t post when intoxicated! You’ll find it harder to keep to the guidelines! Be patient – responses may not appear immediately, but don’t wait too long to respond or reply.
11. Don’t hijack the debate, type in capitals or use txt-spk.

RSS feeds

RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) is a simple technology which allows content from other websites (such as news, legislative updates, court decisions) to be automatically presented and updated on a VLE, avoiding the over-burdening of academics so often associated with new technologies for teaching

Some RSS feeds for the law curriculum:

• OPSI all legislation feed (can be filtered by category)
• BBC news feeds, for example BBC health news feed
• Times Online law news feed

Notifications of podcasts, audio and/or visual updates, can also be received via RSS:

• Radio 4 Law in Action programme feed

RSS can also be used to automate the checking for new content on blogs and wikis:

• UKCLE’s Digital Directions
• PanGloss (online privacy and security law)
• TechnoLlama (technology law)
• Zeugma (legal education and more)

Last Modified: 30 June 2010